t’shuvah

Rosh Hashanah Day 1 2026/5787 for TAA

(Delivered September 12, 2026)

Shabbat shalom! Shanah tovah! 

I want to start with a story from my life. Most of you know I have two sons, and once upon a time, they were quite little. The story I’m about to tell takes place in the sweet spot when they were big enough to think about תשובה—about return or repentance—but little enough that I was still tucking them in every night. It was a very sweet spot indeed.

One night at bedtime, during the month of Elul, I managed to get a quiet moment with each boy. Nobody else was listening, and I said privately to each son in his turn: “If I have done anything to hurt you or harm you in the past year, intentionally or unintentionally, I sincerely ask your forgiveness.” 

I’m a very lucky mom, because even though I had made plenty of mistakes with them over the year, they both accepted my תשובה and offered me their forgiveness. 

A few minutes later, as I was leaving the room, having tucked them both in, I heard a murmur from one bunk to the other one, as one boy said to his brother: “If I have done anything to hurt you or harm you in the past year…”

[…]

Dayeinu, that moment would be sufficient for its sweetness alone. But year by year, as I look back on it, I see new layers. Today, it speaks to me as more than just a teaching moment, but also as a moment that teaches.

At the pshat level, the level of basic, simple meaning, this is a story about תשובה, about the mechanics of asking and offering forgiveness. Going deeper, it reflects the strength that lies in vulnerability and the value of opening ourselves up to criticism or rejection, for the sake of getting closer. It reveals the ways that children can step up when given the tools to do so. And it suggests the ripple effect of not just telling but showing the people around us what’s most important.

We hear a lot these days about the generational transfer of wealth, the resources that one generation passes onto the next, and about how it extends and solidifies differences of advantage and disadvantage. In that context, we typically think of generational wealth as referring to material riches, financial resources like land ownership, money, family heirlooms. 

Yet when you use your grandmother’s silver at Pesach, it’s about much more than how much you might get for it if you put it on eBay, much more than just the ornate spoons and forks. Chances are, that silver traveled a distance, gathering stories as it went. Chances are, you’re using that silver to serve and eat recipes that came from generations past. Chances are, you’re enjoying your meal with people from different generations who share some of your history and likely some of your DNA. 

In Jewish tradition the generational transfer of wealth is not just material. It’s also cultural, religious, historical, and theological. It’s emotional and spiritual. Our Amidah says:

 לְדוֹר וָדוֹר נַגִּיד גָּדְלֶךָ וּלְנֵֽצַח נְצָחִים קְדֻשָּׁתְךָ נַקְדִּישׁ
From generation to generation, we will declare the greatness of God,
and for ever and ever we will amplify God’s holiness. 

From generation to generation לְדוֹר וָדוֹר, we will hold the objects and stories that are precious to us in trust, to transmit to the people we love. And although we have a history in Jewish tradition of revering our elders and our teachers, that’s not the whole story. Truly, the intergenerational sharing flows in all directions.

Take this teaching from the Talmud, on Taanit 7a:

אָמַר רַב נַחְמָן בַּר יִצְחָק: לָמָּה נִמְשְׁלוּ דִּבְרֵי תוֹרָה כְּעֵץ
שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: עֵץ חַיִּים הִיא לַמַּחֲזִיקִים בָּהּ
Rav Nachman bar Yitzhak said: Why do we compare words of Torah to a tree,
as in “It is a tree of life to those who hold on tight to it.”

In other words, how in the world did we get the image of the Torah being like a tree? 

If you stop and think about it, it’s a reasonable question.

The Gemara continues: Just as a small piece of wood can ignite a larger one, so too a lesser Torah scholar can sharpen a more experienced one. This is why Rabbi Chanina says: I have learned much from my teachers, and more from my friends, but it’s from my students that I’ve learned the most. 

And as the one person who gets to learn Torah with all the generations in our community—from the youngest students in our Sylvia Cohen Community School, to the Bnei Mitzvah students I work with in preparation for their Divrei Torah, to the folks in our congregation and around town who share Torah study and Backyard Mishnah, I can confirm. I often say I’m never so dim-witted as when I study Torah by myself; but boy, do I learn from each and every person who comes to my classes!

Another story about intergenerational sharing of wisdom, from the very first mishnah of Pirkei Avot (Wisdom of the Ancestors), starts this way:

משֶׁה קִבֵּל תּוֹרָה מִסִּינַי, וּמְסָרָהּ לִיהוֹשֻׁעַ, וִיהוֹשֻׁעַ לִזְקֵנִים, וּזְקֵנִים לִנְבִיאִים,
וּנְבִיאִים מְסָרוּהָ לְאַנְשֵׁי כְנֶסֶת הַגְּדוֹלָה
Moses received Torah from Sinai, and passed it along to Joshua, and Joshua to the Elders, and the Elders to the Prophets,
and the Prophets passed it along to the men of the Great Assembly.

On the basic level, this is a concrete way of talking about just what I was saying before, about the generational transfer of intellectual and spiritual wealth. But notice the first line: משֶׁה קִבֵּל תּוֹרָה מִסִּינַי—Moses received Torah miSinai. Literally from Sinai, but is that mountain in Egypt really the source of our wisdom tradition? 

Sinai here is a metaphor representing the communal experience of receiving Torah, and not just at one moment in the Book of Exodus, but over the course of the forty years’ wandering, and over the course of the millennia since. Moses and the Israelites received the Torah step by step, and our tradition has been receiving and transmitting it ever since. The sages of the Rabbinic period, the architects of halacha, the midrashists, the women who made their voices heard and the women who couldn’t, the creatives who set it all to music and made images dance in our eyes. 

And always, that receiving and that giving, taking shape in the context of a community of fellow-travelers. More than a place, Sinai is a complex, ever-evolving culture.

Sinai is what we experience in intergenerational community, the way tradition cements itself and becomes a part of us. We see it taking root when we wrap a baby in a family tallit for naming, and when the baby grows up and wears that tallit at their B mitzvah. We see it when the tallit becomes a chuppah and eventually, with fringes torn, a shroud for burial. We receive our tradition from one another in these milestone moments and at other stops along the way.

We are at Sinai when we are in the company of other Jews, singing, or arguing, or studying, or contemplating life’s big questions and themes. We are at Sinai when we come into the synagogue and when we go to the woods. We are at Sinai when we share Jewish cultural events and when we wrestle with ancient teachings. We are at Sinai when we suddenly recognize that the “trust-fall” scene in Mean Girls is communal תשובה, and when we join the circle of kavod at religious school each week. We are at Sinai when we are locked in with the words of our prayer book and when our minds wander to the beauty of the sunlight filtering in through the windows of this holy space.

Sinai is with us and in us. 

And some of the most iconic words of our tradition—words that some of us say several times a day—teach us what to do and how, in order to access the Sinai that is our inheritance. 

שְׁמַע! Listen, as if you’ve never heard them before.

וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת ה’ אֱלֹהֶיךָ
And you will love Adonai your God

Ours is a teaching rooted in love: love for our people, and for our ancestors, and for all the forces that gathered somehow to make us what we are. Forces that, when considered collectively, some people call God.

בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ וּבְכָל־נַפְשְׁךָ וּבְכָל־מְאֹדֶךָ
With all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your being

This is not a halfway project. The tradition that we pass from generation to generation depends on our wholehearted commitment. Whole soul too. Everything we are, and more.

וְהָיוּ הַדְּבָרִים הָאֵלֶּה אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ הַיּוֹם עַל־לְבָבֶךָ
And these things which I command you today should be on your heart

OK, but why ON? The Kotzker Rebbe, one of our ancestors in 18th century Poland, used to teach that we have to set things on our hearts because there are times when our hearts aren’t open. Making it a practice to place our most cherished teachings and ideas on our hearts is a way of making sure that at those moments when our hearts do open, the wisdom is right there, ready to drop in where it is needed the most. 

וְשִׁנַּנְתָּם לְבָנֶיךָ
And teach them to your children

Sometimes I think placing the teachings on your heart and sharing them with your children are actually the same action.

וְדִבַּרְתָּ בָּם בְּשִׁבְתְּךָ בְּבֵיתֶךָ וּבְלֶכְתְּךָ בַדֶּרֶךְ וּבְשָׁכְבְּךָ וּבְקוּמֶךָ
And talk about them when you sit in your house, and when you walk the path, when you lie down, and when you get up

This might be my favorite part, among favorite parts. This line speaks so deeply to the everyday practice of לְדוֹר וָדוֹר. The things we talk about all the time are the things that the people around us learn are important to us. And if they admire us, they begin to regard them as important too.

וּקְשַׁרְתָּם לְאוֹת עַל־יָדֶךָ וְהָיוּ לְטֹטָפֹת בֵּין עֵינֶיךָ
And bind them symbolically on your hands and between your eyes

Keep these cherished teachings where you can see them, keep them in the work of your hands and in the way you view the world. 

וּכְתַבְתָּם עַל־מְזֻזוֹת בֵּיתֶךָ וּבִשְׁעָרֶיךָ
And write them on your doorposts and on your gates.

Not just inside your house but outside too. The words of our tradition sustain us and guide us in the way we encounter the world around us. They are an inheritance we pass up and down the generations, so much so that we are devoting ourselves to intergenerational learning this year through a series of community-wide programs organized and co-planned by the Sylvia Cohen Community School and the Adult Learning Committee. You’ll hear much more about this as the year progresses, and I hope you’ll join and support these programs as yet one more way we engage with one another across time and space, joining in the immortal conversation of our people. 

On this Yom haZikaron—Day of Remembering—may we know the blessing of recalling our sacred past with reverence. On this Yom Harat Olam—Day of the World’s Birth—may we know the optimism of continual re-creation. And on this day of family togetherness, of gathering in beloved community, of apples and honey shared around a joyful table, may we know the sweetness of finding our place in the never ending flow of our beloved tradition. 

Shanah tovah!

Erev Rosh Hashanah 2026/5787 for TAA

(Delivered September 11, 2026)

Shabbat shalom! Shanah tovah!

On the morning of August 7, 1974, a young man with a bold vision pulled off one of the most spectacular victimless crimes ever. For six years prior, he had been methodically planning and setting the pieces in place: bow and arrow, riggings, steel wire. He and his accomplices studied blueprints and weather patterns, structures and elevator schedules, all in the service of whimsy executed at an epic scale.

The young man was Philippe Petit, a French aerialist who dazzled Lower Manhattan for 45 minutes that day, as he walked, danced and even lay down on a tightrope suspended between New York City’s iconic Twin Towers. On that summer day, a mesmerized crowd gathered in the Financial District, hushed, watching, worrying, gasping, applauding in wonderment. High above, Petit dreamed with his body and his soul, magicking into being a world of joy and reverence suspended between life and death, a world where imagination could flower in a hundred directions, where space was unlimited, where gravity didn’t count.

Twenty-five years ago today, Petit’s dreamscape became a nightmare as those towers crumbled, destroyed by terrorists. Something broke on that awful day. Any notion of safety and justice lay twisted in the rubble. The suspension between life and death seemed forever decided, the delicate cord permanently snapped.

I say “seemed” because the tightrope between life and death ultimately remains eternal, something our tradition has been reflecting about for millennia, something we call into our souls deeply at this time of year.

A series of tales from the rabbinic period goes on flights of speculation to rival any modern-day fan-fiction, around the question of what lies beyond the boundaries of the known world. One such midrash, from Breishit Rabbah, chapter 4, reports an encounter between Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Shimon ben Zoma. 

וּכְבָר הָיָה רַבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן בֶּן זוֹמָא יוֹשֵׁב וְתוֹהֶא
It happened that Rabbi Shimon ben Zoma was sitting in contemplation

R. Yehoshua passes by and asks how he is, once then twice, with no answer. On the third try, ben Zoma startles. Rabbi Yehoshua asks insistently: “Are you OK? What’s going on?” 

Ben Zoma emerges from his reverie, only slightly.

The secret his contemplation reveals? There’s very little distance between the heavens and the earth. The רוח אלהים—the breath of the divine—that hovers over the waters in the Creation narrative, is interpreted by the Rabbis of this Midrash, to pass through a space smaller than your hand.

The space between earth and heaven, between life and death, is at once an unbridgeable chasm and a span no wider than a whisper or the flutter of a hummingbird’s wing.

As we enter these Ten Days of Teshuvah, we are suspended in this unfathomable yet delicate space between life and death. 

After months of reflection, soul-searching, חשבון הנפש—taking the soul’s account—we arrive tonight at the starting line. Over the course of the coming week and a half, we will pin ourselves down in the crucible of our own lives, daring ourselves not to look away. This season, equal parts mounting dread and sweet hopes, days of bulky, complex, alienating liturgy and festive reunions with dear friends and family… The whole shebang invites us into the holy work of telling ourselves the truth.

And while we are each taking our soul’s account, tradition holds that God is working the other side of the ledger. The Talmud teaches on Rosh Hashanah 16b that God keeps track of humanity through three books, and during the Ten Days of Teshuvah opens them for review. There’s the book of resha’im gemurim (the thoroughly wicked), and the book of tzadikim gemurim (the thoroughly righteous), and the book of the beinoni’im (the in-betweeners). For people in the first two categories, God’s work is simple: the wholly wicked are summarily written and sealed for death; the wholly righteous are immediately written and sealed for life. But we, the beinoni’im, flutter between life and death for these Yamim Nora’im, these Reverent Days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, while God examines our lives, to discern a final decision about the year ahead. 

We walk the tightrope between life and death. If we take them seriously, these days of reflection demand that we acknowledge our worst moments without excuses, and open ourselves to judgment both human and divine. We picture ourselves facing the judgment of our Creator, as we catalog all that we have done wrong throughout the year. The urgency of teshuvah is matched only by our vulnerability. The machzor reminds us of life’s fragility and brevity. It teaches that our lives are short, shorter than we may think. Unetaneh tokef imagines the many ends that could await us: 

מִי יִחְיֶה וּמִי יָמוּת
Who will live and who will die
מִי בְקִצּוֹ וּמִי לֹא בְּקִצּוֹ
Who in a good time and who untimely
מִי בַמַּיִם וּמִי בָאֵשׁ
Who by water, and who by fire

And yet in the same breath, it reminds us:

וּתְשׁוּבָה וּתְפִלָּה וּצְדָקָה מַעֲבִירִין אֶת רֹעַ הַגְּזֵרָה
Return, reflection, and righteousness can soften our harsh fate. 

Into this liminal space between life and death, between thriving and emptiness, words from Isaiah, chapter 40 flow:

כָּל־הַבָּשָׂר חָצִיר וְכָל־חַסְדּוֹ כְּצִיץ הַשָּׂדֶה׃
יָבֵשׁ חָצִיר נָבֵל־צִיץ
All flesh is grass, and all its chesed like flowers of the field
Grass dries out, and blossoms fade

It’s worth pausing over the metaphor, for within its almost nihilistic view of human insignificance is tucked a glimmer of divine hope. Our physical beings and our deeds are like grass and flowers that become parched and die. But remember, flowers shed seeds. If human chesed is like a flower, it has the potential to endure, even as the bloom fades. The seeds of our kindness continue to blossom in the souls of others. Every act of caring we engage in, every mitzvah we fulfill, plants a seed for more chesed in this world. 

On this thin thread between life and death that we dare to contemplate at this season, the choices we make form both the substance of our lives right now and what we will be remembered for after we’re gone. What we do in this one and only life, including the ways in which we reckon with our own failings, will become our legacy. Death is inevitable but while we walk the tightrope of life, let us strive for righteousness and love, in the hopes that when our time of flourishing ends, we have planted seeds that will continue to flourish. Our tradition is to say, זכרונם לברכה—may their memory be for a blessing—when someone dies. I can think of no more important aspiration than to live in such a way as to make our memory a blessing, when memory is all that’s left of us. 

And so as we enter this period of intense reflection, may we find inspiration in the image of that space between life and death—Philippe Petit’s tightrope, ben Zoma’s delicate membrane. May the fragility of it all inspire us to plant the seeds of lovingkindness with our every deed. And at the times when inevitably we miss the mark, may we draw on the season’s invitation to conscience to realign our steps and write our way into the book of life. 

Shanah tovah!

Dvarim for TAA

(Delivered July 18, 2026)

There is something in the air at this time of year, and I don’t mean the yellow haze we’ve been experiencing. Although on the one hand it seems incongruous to think of teshuvah in the middle of summer, the High Holidays have a long on-ramp. On purpose. It’s hard and painstaking work to prepare ourselves, not to mention preparing to prepare ourselves. So we start early.

With Tisha b’Av this Wednesday night, the bottom is about to drop out. And then the pull starts to get stronger and stronger over the coming two months. Somehow we need all that time. 

In rabbinical school and out, there is typically a sense of frenzy and overwhelm in the fall. Between regular work and gearing up for holiday pulpit work, the vibe among rabbis is joyful but stressful. Students and rabbis alike find that there’s a lot of energy around—what tune do you use here? How in the world am I going to get all these verses of Al Chet Shechatanu L’fanecha to sound fluent enough? Will my voice get tired and start to fade by N’ilah? Will I remember the right tunes at the right moments?

For clergy—and perhaps especially for student clergy—preparing for the holidays feels like standing at the base of a mountain that we’re both required and terrified to climb.

My wonderful teacher, Rabbi Allan Lehmann, taught me a lot about this during my time at Hebrew College. Allan had served as a congregational rabbi for over 40 years, and even after he left his pulpit to do other kinds of rabbinic work, he continued to lead high holidays in various communities, basically wherever he found himself. That’s almost half a century worth of carrying a community through the cycle of rebuke, consolation, return, and atonement. 

One fall, Allan—who was not doing high holidays that year for the first time in basically forever—commented that he was still experiencing the symptoms, the old familiar worry and overwhelm. This was a guy who had led more services than anyone I know, and who knew every word and every nuance…and who wasn’t even scheduled to lead that year… and he was feeling stressed out. 

He said to me, I thought when I retired from doing this stuff that I would be able to relax in this season. But I still feel it in my guts. I still feel the angst.  

Allan’s wisdom was this: It’s not just about the standing in front of the community and leading. It’s about the meaning within the holidays themselves. We feel anxious because that’s the design of this time of year. It’s topical, and it’s inherent. We can’t help thinking: Is this going to be the year that God says my time is ending? Is this going to be the year I lose someone dear? 

The more we are attuned to Jewish life and Jewish rhythm, the more the cadence of the calendar evokes this inner churning. The tug of this season is strong—like the tides we live by in our beautiful seaside community. 

It’s not the yellow fog at all, but there IS something in the air… about needing to face ourselves and our mistakes. When we think of what teshuvah—real teshuvah—entails, it’s unsurprising that we need this on-ramp. Even admitting a small mistake can be hard for many of us. To face our most consequential errors—the ones that have resulted in hurt feelings or in shattered relationships—that takes a good deal of courage and readiness. 

And so we take our time to find our way. 

Our parsha this week, which is always read on the Shabbat before Tisha b’Av, suggests the model and tries to give us the push we need. The entirety of Sefer Dvarim (the book of Deuteronomy) consists of Moses looking back over the story of the Israelites—retelling, recasting, rethinking—as he reckons with the reality that he will not be privy to how the story ends. He describes many of the misdeeds of the Israelites as he sifts through the shards of the eventful journey he’s led and tries to make meaning of it. In the chaplaincy world, this is called life review and is a normative part of aging.

In a way, life review is also what we do in our souls in this long leadup to and through the High Holidays. We look carefully at our past and try to make meaning of it, searching for ways to make peace where needed.

So our parsha gives us a role model, fallible as he may be. And still, the language needs to noodge us along. Three times in our Torah portion, we encounter the phrase רַב־לָכֶם indicating a kind of too-much-ness. Two of the three are direct orders to get moving!

Dvarim chapter 1, verse 6 reads: 

ה’ אֱלֹהֵינוּ דִּבֶּר אֵלֵינוּ בְּחֹרֵב לֵאמֹר רַב־לָכֶם שֶׁבֶת בָּהָר הַזֶּה׃
Adonai your God spoke to you at Horev, saying,
“You have stayed too long at this mountain.”

In the next chapter, verse 3 reads:

רַב־לָכֶם סֹב אֶת־הָהָר הַזֶּה פְּנוּ לָכֶם צָפֹנָה׃
You have circled this mountain too long; turn northward.

On the one hand, Moses is deep in reflection. On the other, the story he’s telling is one of pushing on, making our way. The parsha is balancing ruminating and movement, in a way that speaks to us if we listen.

And yet, listening is hard. And this is where the magic of Shabbat Chazon comes into focus. The call to movement, toward the work of teshuvah begins this week, with a faint whisper. Rather than coming at us with a blunt force, the wave of self-reflection starts as something like the still small voice we read about in the story of Eliahu haNavi. 

It enters like a distant music that gradually but insistently comes closer, like a spiritual doppler effect. This Shabbat, we turn that corner not only through words (dvarim, ironically) but through melody. As you probably noticed, both the Torah and the Haftarah readings contained interpolations of a less-familiar sound, the sound of Eicha trope. I’ve mentioned before that Jewish liturgical music helps us tell time, and this is a beautiful example. The elegiac tone of the musical expression hits us in a place where resistance is lowered. The mournful tune cracks our defenses, allowing us to break, so we can heal. 

The music speaks to us in a language that bypasses language. And so our tradition offers a multi-modal invitation into the work of teshuvah. Where words might tell us it’s time to move; it’s melody that actually moves us.

Shabbat shalom! 

Matot-Mas’ei for TAA

(delivered July 11, 2026)

As we’ve talked about many times, our tradition makes a study and a practice of contradiction. And so it is that in the beautiful summertime, in the midst of beach days, family visits, and spontaneous ice cream cones, we hold some space for soul-searching, and even grief. In the Three Weeks preceding Tisha b’Av, the prevailing emotional tone is one of anguish and regret. The haftarot in these Three Weeks are known collectively as the tlat dePoranuta, the three haftarot of rebuke.

The combination of the mood of rebuke at this time of year, and this week’s teachings about vows, worked a particular spell on me, as I recalled an incident that occurred in my first few months of serving as TAA’s rabbi. 

In the spring of 2024, before I even started my official job here, Rabbi Kudan, my predecessor, forwarded me an email from the staff at Camp Ramah about clergy visiting day. A good number of our students were planning to be at camp, and although I didn’t really know them yet, it seemed like a great opportunity to connect. Bright-eyed and full of ambition and desire to serve, I signed up for not one but two clergy visiting days, one for each session. After all, we had students in both sessions and I didn’t want anyone to feel left out. What if I go to one and not the other? Then the kids in session one will resent the kids in session two or vice versa. Well, I thought. No problem. I’ll do both. What could be hard about that? So it’s two hours’ drive each way on a Thursday, big deal!

But as I got used to the rhythm of the week and the challenge and time commitment of composing a Dvar Torah for every Shabbat, as I learned that my personal cadence of work involved writing on Thursday afternoons after a long walk in the sunshine, I got more and more nervous as the time for my first camp visit approached.

In the event, I ended up canceling both visits because I just couldn’t get myself organized well enough to both drive across the state and back and prepare for Shabbat in a way that felt sufficient. Not to mention being away on a Thursday meant that I wouldn’t get to learn with our Torah study group, which is often a critical component of my writing prep.

Of course, on the first day of religious school that year, one of the students, a precocious and delightful person whom I have come to love very much, came up to me and with disappointment in their eyes, said, Rav Naomi I thought you were going to come to visiting day, but you never showed up. 

If you had pierced my heart with a rusty dagger, I think it would’ve caused less pain than what I felt for having tried too hard and disappointed one of our students.

It was through that lens that I read the passage in Parshat Matot-Mas’ei dealing with vows. The parsha asks us to consider earnestly what is binding about those promises, and what the consequences of broken vows can be. Chapter 30, verse 3 reads, in part:

כְּכָל־הַיֹּצֵא מִפִּיו יַעֲשֶׂה
All that a person speaks, they must do 

This phrase lands as a rebuke, reminding us of times when our words and our expectations of ourselves were overly aspirational. I suspect we can all think of situations when we’ve made a promise with the best of intentions and found ourselves unable to fulfill it. Encountering this teaching in the season of reprimand—as we begin the tender communal process of looking at our deeds—carries a heavy weight.

But if you look at the structure of the season, begadol, you know that as much as our tradition invests deeply in the mourning and grief of Tisha b’Av, we don’t remain there. The three haftarot of rebuke are followed by more than twice as many (seven!) of consolation. All this grief and admonishment is part of a larger process, with an ultimate emphasis on repair rather than reproach. This long arc brings us through the psychological phases we need in order to make teshuvah.

In these Three Weeks approaching Tisha b’Av, we take on traditional practices of mourning. Some observances include no haircuts, no public celebrations, no weddings. We allow the three haftarot of rebuke to permeate the crevices of our lives as we remove the distractions that allow us to ignore our own shortcomings. The grief comes to its fulfillment with the fast day of Tisha b’Av. Then, afterward, in the seven weeks that follow through the course of the month of Elul, we take on self-reflection and return, as time moves inexorably through its cycle.

Reflective Elul takes us into the 10 days of teshuvah (return), as we work deep inside and in our relationships to mend what can be mended.

With Yom Kippur, we let it all go. We release our burdens with the faith that God will forgive us, even for the vows we were not able to keep. Four days later, we go outside and despite all the fragility that life gives us, we rejoice in community—and then, in the wisdom tradition that teaches us to be a community.

I thought of this rhythm deeply over this past week because this past Thursday, I had a chance to make things right. I made arrangements with my Torah study folks for lay leadership, and planned to give less time and energy to the Dvar Torah, so that I could devote the time to be with some of our youngest members on clergy visiting day at camp. 

I am happy to share that it was great to see our children joyfully immersed in a Jewish environment without any pressure to conform to the non-Jewish world. I got to visit with our campers (including four whose B’nei Mitzvah I officiated this past year): to spend a little time with them, obviously to take some selfies, and to pass along messages from their families and small gifts from their congregation. 

And most blessedly, I had the opportunity to see the student who had been so innocently disappointed in me two years ago; to look them in the eyes and to see how much it meant to them that their rabbi showed up this time.

כל היוצא מפי עשיתי
All that I said I would do, I did

May we all be blessed with such second chances, with a forgiving reception when we try to clean the slate, and with the perspective to see that the cycle of time invites us into reflection so that we can do better by the people who matter to us.

Shabbat Chol haMoed Pesach for TAA

(Delivered April 4, 2026)

Shabbat shalom & moadim l’simcha!

So yesterday, in a panic to write the introductions for the aliyot, I discovered quite by accident that the Torah readings for Shabbat Chol haMoed Pesach for Shabbat Chol haMoed Sukkot are exactly the same. In Sukkot’s moment of embracing the impermanence of life and in Pesach’s moment of exulting in liberation, we scroll back to the same place, to witness God and Moses repairing their connection following the abasement of the Golden Calf. On the face of it, it seems incongruous. Insecurity and freedom take us to the same place. Why? What makes these Torah readings wink at each other from halfway across the calendar? Why might we turn to them in these two different but both liminal moments?

The connection to Sukkot is easier to grasp. Sukkot puts us in a mind of vulnerability—at Sukkot we purposely abandon our shelters and routines to subject ourselves to the elements. We read world-weary Kohelet. We enact all manner of rain-seeking ritual in order to try to influence what cannot be influenced. We make it a point to remind ourselves that we are at the mercy of forces much larger than us, and instead of cowering in a corner with this knowledge, we go outside for the week and enjoy the moonlight. This seems a perfect time to engage a Torah reading that gives us Moses at his most anxious and God saying, in so many words, I’m here. Hold on.

The connection of the exact same Torah reading to Pesach feels a little more tenuous on first glance. Why, with the taste of liberation on our lips, do we pause during the days of Moed and remind ourselves of just how quickly that liberation went wrong, of just how unprepared we actually were for freedom and how foolishly we navigated it?

At our seders, when we heard Moses say in our mind’s ear, “Let My people go!” we might or might not have thought about what he said next. The full phrase that God thunders, through Moses, is שלח את עמי ויעבדוני—let My people go and they will serve Me. The end goal of freedom wasn’t about sleeping late in the morning or heading to the beach at a moment’s notice or (my personal favorite) driving fast with the wind in your face. Rather it was about becoming fully-realized spiritual beings, about committing ourselves to God.

Let’s listen carefully to the Hebrew. In leaving Egypt we go מעבדות לחירות; and what God tells Moses to demand of Pharaoh is שלח את עמי ויעבדוני. You hear it, right? The connection between slavery עבדות and sacred obligation עבודה, are both derived from the same root letters—ayin, bet, daled.

The exodus was about exchanging the עבדות of enslavement to Pharaoh for the עבדות of serving God. I like to say we traded up! 

Still, what followed after the exodus was neither easy nor simple. Our feet had barely dried after crossing Yam Suf when the complaining and the doubt and the rose-colored memories of the good old days of slavery started. Then, when Moses went up Mount Sinai to be with God, and to receive the teachings that would guide our lives for generations to come, the Israelites panicked and made a huge communal mistake. Our Torah reading picks up the story in the aftermath of this mass hysteria, and asks us to explore the question of what comes next after such a rupture. 

The scene between Moses and God reads a little bit like a dialogue between lovers who have just had their first real fight: Moses pleads for more reassurance, testing over and over again to find out—have I really found grace in your eyes? Meanwhile, God offers presence and promises. Back and forth they go, trying to rebuild what has been shaken by a staggering breach of trust. Reconciliation doesn’t come all at once but rather on its own schedule, in this halting, slightly desperate exchange. On it goes until Moses asks the impossible.

 וַיֹּאמַר הַרְאֵנִי נָא אֶת־כְּבֹדֶךָ׃
And he said: oh please show me Your presence.

We know—as God reiterates in verse 20—that humans cannot actually see God and live, but Moses in this moment is standing in for an entire traumatized community. He needs to be strengthened for continued leadership, and he intuits that the Israelites’ slide into idolatry was partly informed by the sheer difficulty of believing in a God they could not see. He needs to know that what he’s teaching the Israelites is going to hold them—and him—steady until they can finally reach their promised destination. 

The best that God can offer, though, is a compromise: that Moses can come close, nestle into a crevice of the rock, and then get a glimpse from behind as God passes by. God says, essentially, Look, there’s a place near Me. Come stand in this crag, 

וְשַׂכֹּתִי כַפִּי עָלֶיךָ עַד־עָבְרִי׃
And I will shelter you with My hand until I have passed by.

This is a gesture of surpassing tenderness. It says: You need something I can’t give. Let’s find another way; let me take care of you in the ways I can, and hope that it’s enough. You may not see me where I am, but you will see where I’ve been.

In fact this seems just the thought to call back to mind in moments of insecurity or transition, in the literal Chol haMoeds of Sukkot or Pesach as much as in the figurative Chol haMoeds of life. These moments when we have lost our way are exactly the moments when it’s comforting to remember our ancestors coped with doubt and trouble as well, and that despite everything, they found a way back to the presence of the divine.

To think of this reconciliation during Sukkot is to reassure ourselves that the unpredictability we experience in our flimsy shelters is countered by a force far greater than ourselves, something we can return to at any moment to knit ourselves back into the fabric of certainty. And reflecting on this reconciliation in the middle of Pesach helps to remind us that there’s more to the God Whose power can bring about a series of plagues—each one more horrific than the last—and lead the Israelites from degradation to exaltation. The mighty hand that pulled the Israelites from the trap of hopelessness and enslavement, and the tender hand that sheltered a shellshocked and grieving Moses are one and the same.

Tzav for TAA

(Delivered March 28, 2026)

Shabbat shalom!

At the risk of annoying my Torah study folks, I have to say it again. You might even want to say it with me: The Torah is always right on time. 

This week our reading, from Parshat Tzav, is teaching us about offerings, about fire and purification and even chametz. As the taxonomy of different offerings takes shape, Aaron and the Kohanim are downloading instruction for how to make different kinds of offerings, how to take on the mantle of Priesthood: what to offer, what to keep and what to take elsewhere.

Meanwhile the calendar is teaching us that it’s time to clean out our kitchens to prepare for Pesach. We are engaged in sorting and switching and cooking and planning and consulting a taxonomy of what’s allowed and what’s not. Like the ancient Priests, we, too, are downloading instruction. Like the ancient Priests, we, too, find ourselves discerning what to offer, what to keep, and what to take elsewhere.

The fact that the word chametz comes up in the parsha; the fact that there is an aliyah which seems so clearly to be about matzah brei in this parsha that always occurs around this time of year, can certainly start to make you wonder. What’s the link? Other than the literal קָרְבַּן פֶּסַח—one of the three essential elements of the seder, according to Rabban Gamliel—what does the ancient system of offerings have to do with Pesach? Why does our tradition throw them together?

This question came up in Torah study the other day, but I didn’t quite know how to address it. Of course there are the obvious links, but why are they there? The Torah is generally not for the obvious, not for the easy answers. The conversation Thursday moved on unconcluded, but I couldn’t shake the subtle question from my mind. 

Why are the offerings and the holiday of Pesach so entangled?

As it says in the הַגָּדָה, we begin to answer.

The link I’m starting to make out, as if through fog, comes through the Kabbalistic teaching that chametz can be interpreted metaphorically, as an excess of ego. Just as leavening causes breads to rise and puff up, so too our own egos can cause us to get puffed-up, to become arrogant and full of ourselves. When we invest too much in shallow or self-serving ideas and actions, we tend to lose sight of what’s important. Preparing for Pesach is a way to take stock of the excesses in our lives, in the kitchen, and in our very selves. It’s like a tune-up for the work of teshuvah that we do in the sweep from Elul into the fall holidays. 

In the springtime, as we seek out the chametz in our kitchens, we also examine our own attitudes and temptations: Where am I sliding into self-regard? Where am I turning my compass toward praise and ego-gratification, rather than integrity and service?

And then, when we’ve sought out all those places of puffery and hubris, when we’ve gathered them together, we sweep them out. What we do in our physical homes, we do for our spiritual selves. 

The tradition of Biur Chametz (burning chametz) calls us, on the morning of the day of the first Seder, to collect, disavow, and burn any remaining chametz in our kitchens. After we’ve gathered all the crumbs, we place them on a pan, light a fire, and turn them into smoke, enacting a kind of mini קָרְבַּן of all that we must avoid during Pesach. As with our crumbs, so too with our own failings. If chametz represents our vanity, burning our chametz represents trimming our egos back down to size.

Biur Chametz recalls the burnt offerings of the parsha, and indeed when we look at the practice outlined in the first aliyah, of תְּרוּמָת הַדֶּשֶׁן—raising up the ashes—we can begin to flesh out the analogy. The act of תְּרוּמָת הַדֶּשֶׁן involves the Kohen, dressed in his priestly finery, beginning each morning by sweeping up the ashes of the previous day’s offerings. The work of תְּרוּמָת הַדֶּשֶׁן is unglamorous; it’s simply what needs to be done. In the same way that the world is created anew each morning, the Kohen wiping the slate clean of ashes around the altar makes it possible to start afresh ritually each morning. The picture of such an exalted figure as a Kohen basically relegated to cleanup duty is a powerful call to examine our relationship with status. The medieval Jewish scholar, Bahya Ibn Pekuda describes the spiritual valence of תְּרוּמָת הַדֶּשֶׁן as, “forsaking greatness and honor by serving God.” And after lifting up the ashes, the Kohen changes into the Priestly equivalent of his dungarees and does the even less exalted part, of taking the ashes outside the camp to a place of purity for disposal. That the primary religious leaders of the time were implicated in this mundane and messy task tells us a lot about how our tradition wants us to deal with our egos.

Elsewhere in the parsha we encounter the description of the butchery of the guilt offering: what to do with the various animal parts like the blood and the fat and the kidneys. Tucked into this alienatingly exacting—and graphic— passage is the phrase הַיֹּתֶרֶת עַל־הַכָּבֵד—the protuberance on the liver. Playing with the language, we can wander into the realm of allegory to discover yet another wink at controlling our own egos. If we repoint the vowels, it reads הַיֹּתֶרֶת עַל־הַכָּבֹד—the excess of glory. This excess of glory, like the fat and the kidneys, is ultimately burned up, as an offering to something larger than the self.

So with respect to our original question about what’s underneath the subtle alignment of Torah reading and calendar, I suspect it has to do with inviting us to open the metaphor of Pesach preparation and allow it to work on our souls as much as on our kitchens. Turning a process that could be just a panicked scramble into something rich with meaning is one way for us to fulfill the principle that comes to us from the Mishnah by way of the Haggadah: 

בְּכָל דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת עַצְמוֹ כְאִלּוּ הוּא יָצָא מִמִּצְרַיִם
In each and every generation, a person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally went out from Egypt.

Preparing our homes, burning our chametz: these are a way of making an offering to God, of connecting with our ancient practices and investing them with modern, personal meaning. 

Bechol dor vador indeed.

Shabbat shalom!

Yom Kippur for TAA

Delivered October 2, 2025

Imagine you wake up at the same time every day, make the same breakfast, drive the same route, do the same work, come home, same dinner, same bedtime, rinse and repeat. Then one morning a pipe bursts. Your kitchen floods. Everything is a mess, and your routine is hopelessly disrupted. You call plumbers; you have to eat out; you can’t do your kids’ drop-off; your plans crumble. The chaos jolts you out of your rhythms, and you start to notice things differently. You see what you take for granted; you ask for help; you reconsider priorities.

Similarly, Yom Kippur bursts our life’s patterns. So much of what we do by habit during the rest of the year is altered today—from speaking Baruch Shem Kvod Malchuto aloud, to fasting, to fixating on our own mortality. On this day, God orchestrates a “flood” in our internal life, forcing us to attend to what really matters.

The liturgy today takes us to dark places, describing in excruciating detail the many ways that we could have, and probably did, go off the rails over the past year. We stand for long intervals of time, beating our chests, naming every imaginable human frailty. And then we do it again, and again, and again. We grapple with the imagery of God weighing our lives in the balance over the past 10 days, and deciding before havdalah, whether we will live or whether we will die. And if we die, in what manner. 

And then there’s the Torah reading that picks up after the sudden, shocking deaths of Aaron‘s sons, Nadav and Avihu, and asks Aaron to go on as normal, to resume his priestly duties with precision and dispassion. 

Not to mention the haftarah, with its disdain for the Israelites’ insincere attempts at atonement. 

The eye of the needle we are hoping to thread with our teshuvah is very thin indeed. 

Back in July, I attended the funeral of my teacher Judith Kates’ beloved husband Bill. Now Bill was the kind of person about whom everybody felt like they were his best friend. He managed to find time and authentic attention for each person: not just skimming the surface, but allowing a depth of connection to blossom with each encounter. It didn’t take a burst pipe to get him to pay attention to what matters. 

One of his friends, speaking at the funeral, said something which is still with me months later: the unbearable was always part of the conversation. The friend meant this as the highest compliment. He was talking about how Bill had the capacity to face what most of us avoid. The unbearable was always part of the conversation.

Yom Kippur, more than any other holiday, forces us to confront the unbearable. The restrictions of this long day give us no way to distract ourselves from hard truths: no food, no electronics, no idle chitchat. Our purpose today is clear, almost too clear. There is no escaping the unbearable on Yom Kippur.

The menu of unbearable things is unusually robust this year: for the US, for the world, and for the Jewish people as a whole. Without breaking a sweat, I’m sure any one of us could come up with a fistful of unbearables: war in Ukraine, soon to enter its fourth year; spiraling violence, including the attack on the Mormon church in Michigan this week that left five dead and the church badly damaged and the attack just this morning in Manchester England, whose details are not yet known; the dysfunctional American leadership that squanders the privilege of their position to engage in callous brinksmanship, playing Russian roulette with our lives; the indiscriminate crackdown on immigrants in the US and elsewhere; and of course, perhaps the most unbearable for many of us in this room: the catastrophic war in Gaza that has the Jewish community on the defensive both internally and on the global stage.

Judging by the tone of the Rosh Hashanah sermons from other rabbis that have been forwarded to me in the past ten days, it seems that many of us feel the urgency of the conflict in Israel and Gaza. I know our community is not uniform in its point of view about the crisis, nor should it be. And as I write this, just days before unplugging for the holiday, it’s impossible to predict whether the Trump-Netanyahu peace plan on the table will actually settle things down or serve as yet another spark to further ignite an already terrifying conflagration. I genuinely don’t know what will happen next and if it will be to the good. Nobody does. But taking to heart Bill Kates’s practice of allowing the unbearable to be part of the conversation, what feels important is that we allow ourselves to talk about it, even if we don’t have all the answers, even if it feels almost unbearable.

And as I am your no-longer-quite-so-new rabbi, you should know who I am and where I struggle. You should know what I find unbearable. We should be able to have this conversation, despite how much it hurts, despite it revealing some tensions. We should address it, knowing that we will be called upon to be there for each other in community even where we disagree. As I said last night, our task is to make a heart of many rooms. Let me show you around some of the rooms of my heart.

Like many rabbis, I find myself paralyzed at the crossroads of loving Israel and feeling deep misgivings about the direction of Israeli policy. I believe without question in Israel’s right to exist, just as I believe in Israel’s responsibility to be the embodiment of Jewish values. I say all this with a good deal of humility, knowing that I don’t live there and don’t face the rammings, bombings, and daily rocket attacks (which had been going on long before October 7). 

The devastation of Hamas’s barbaric attack, and the ongoing hostage situation, now 727 days in, is impossible to overstate. In those first horrific days and months, I was blind with rage and pain. No amount of warfare would have felt like too much. Yet as the war grinds on, I have come to feel that it is no longer serving a purpose. In fact, it seems more and more that the war in Gaza is making Jews less safe everywhere, and is doing nothing to bring home the remaining hostages. 

Meanwhile Gaza is in ruins and another generation of Palestinians is in the position of seeing Israelis and Jews as oppressors—and their advocates are forcefully making that case to the world at large. Whether or not this is objectively accurate is of no consequence when, aided and abetted by simple-minded but extremely effective propaganda and slogans, Israel’s detractors are growing ever more strident with their conviction that the very existence of the Jewish state is untenable.

These lines from the Haftarah: 

הֲכָזֶה יִהְיֶה צוֹם אֶבְחָרֵהוּ
Have I chosen a fast like this?

are impossible to hear without thinking of the starvation taking hold in Gaza. 

The words:

וְעַל חֵטְא שֶׁחָטָאנוּ לְפָנֶיךָ בְּאִמּוּץ הַלֵּב
And for the sin we have committed before you by hardening our hearts

are impossible to hear without thinking of how easy it is to turn away from the suffering of hostage families and Gazans alike.

The words: 

אֵין דָּבָר נֶעְלָם מִמֶּךָּ וְאֵין נִסְתָּר מִנֶּגֶד עֵינֶיךָ
There is nothing hidden from You, and there is nothing secret in Your eyes

are impossible to hear without wondering how all this will turn out, or even what’s true amidst the swirl of impassioned polemics. 

Having encountered each of these phrases and many more that trouble me over the course of this solemn day of soul searching, I wonder—and perhaps you do too—where to draw courage from as we navigate so much that is unbearable. 

One resource is teshuvah itself, the reason for the season, so to say. Breishit Rabbah, a collection of Midrashic literature from the fifth century, teaches in the name of Rabbi Abahu bar Ze’ira: ”Great is teshuvah, for it existed in the world before Creation.” What this says to me is that the work of teshuvah is foundational. It’s part of the makeup of this world; the work of teshuvah is eternal, woven into the fabric of all creation. Human beings are made to sin, to regret, to try to make it right. That we, as Jews, choose to make it a core practice in our lives and to surface it in particular at this season is reinforced by its origin story in our tradition.

Another resource takes us back to that funeral I attended over the summer. The unbearable was always part of the conversation. Part of what made Bill Kates so special was his ability to accompany the people he cared about into the realm of the unbearable. Indeed we can bear so much more when we bear it together in relationship and in community. The conversation is more than just talking together. It is the way we meet one another with care, bring out one another’s deepest concerns, hold one another’s needs with gentleness and curiosity. The conversation is a million invisible threads that weave us together in our vulnerability and our striving toward wholeness. 

As we confront the too many unbearables of the current moment, let us do so in conversation and in community. Let us allow the stark Yom Kippur liturgy, with its insistence on the first person plural—Ashamnu—WE have been guilty; al Chet shechatanu, for the sins which WE have committed—let’s allow that sense of “we” to do its work on us and forge us into a collective. Let us hold each other, regardless of our individual political orientations, in the crucible of teshuvah and hold ourselves accountable for discerning how we can most be of use in this tragic but redeemable world. 

Shanah tovah.

Kol Nidrei / Erev Yom Kippur for TAA

(Delivered October 1, 2025)

When I was little, my mom had a cute habit of pretending she couldn’t quite make me out. I’d get up in the morning and go find her, and she’d say, “Is that you?” Although I do have three siblings, we are different enough from each other and far enough apart in age that I’m pretty sure my mom knew it was actually me. But still, it was fun to play the game, and to get that delicious moment of recognition when she would act like she couldn’t believe her luck at running into me, as if we’d been apart for decades, not hours. 

Looking back on it as an adult, I can see in her question, “Is that you?” more depth of meaning than either of us probably imagined during those days of practiced silliness.

The world we live in today seems designed to prevent us—parents and children, friends, partners, and strangers alike—from truly seeing one another. So many aspects of our lives are mediated: by the screens that dominate our waking hours; by the modern definition of work, which presses us to keep up a punishing pace, with no room for reflection or connection; by a poisonous algorithm that daily divides us into sharp categories designed for maximum agitation and isolation. Day by day, I encounter people who are even considering cutting off ties with someone they went to high school with, or with a co-worker, or, God forbid, with a child or a parent, because their political beliefs are so far apart as to make it impossible to talk without opening up a painful, unbridgeable chasm between them. Throughout these recent years of recreational rage, controversy and contention, I pride myself on not having broken off any relationships, but even I have to admit to a whole lot of avoidance. The much-talked-about polarization of American discourse has led to too many slammed doors, literal and figurative. As Rabbi Tali Adler puts it, “We have started to see each other … not as neighbors but as people who think the wrong things.” 

As always, I look to our tradition for guidance, if not precedent. As folks who participated in Backyard Mishnah this summer may remember, I have a fondness and an emotional connection with the Sages of the Rabbinic period. Even as foreign as it feels to us in terms of daily life, the world of the ancient Rabbis had more than a little bit in common with our world today. Like us, the Rabbis found themselves facing prejudices and violence because of who they were. Like us, the Rabbis found themselves in a place of profound alienation from cultural norms that had once seemed unbreakable. Like us, the Rabbis found themselves navigating profound communal disagreements that could have broken them apart. But also they found themselves with a sense of purpose: having lost their Temple and their homeland, they sought to reimagine every aspect of the world from the vantage point of their exile, as they built a new Judaism from the broken shards of the old one.

Despite the fact that we live very different lives from theirs—not many of us are blacksmiths or ride to and from work on a donkey, much less spend all our days reading, reciting, and memorizing Torah—even so, perhaps some of the principles they derived speak to our current day.

One core teaching comes to us from chapter 7 of Tosefta Sotah, a compilation of Jewish law from the second century. In the chapter, the Rabbis are grappling with ambiguities of meaning in the Torah and looking for a way to resolve the contradictions. In a mysterious and perhaps slightly maddening example, they look at the appearance of these three similar but different citations from Parshat Yitro: דברים  הדברים & אלה הדברים—words, the words, and these are the words. To the Rabbis, these almost-repetitions are different enough to raise curiosity, and so they wondered together, why the difference? Is one expression more valid than another, and if so, why? Which is the right one, the authoritative one? 

The way they resolve the question is subtle, and opens a way to abide this and other disagreements: כָּל הַדְּבָרִים נִתְּנוּ מֵרֹעֶה אֶחָד—All these things / words were given by one Shepherd. That is to say, the Torah can refer to things in different ways because it’s all part of a greater whole. There doesn’t have to be one and only one way to understand something. And from that, the Rabbis offer a gorgeous image to harmonize the principle:

 אַף אַתָּה עָשָׂה לִבְּךָ חַדְרֵי חֲדָרִים—Only make yourself a heart of many rooms.

A spacious heart, with capacity for understanding multiple viewpoints, can hold the uncertainty of not knowing, can open the imagination to a deeper understanding of the role that perspective plays in our experience.

Luckily for us, the Rabbis didn’t insist on unanimity—or worse, on one opinion being right and the rest being thrown out. Instead, as even a cursory look at a page of Talmud will show, they kept everything, almost like hoarders of ideas. Text and commentary, argument and counterargument, secondary and tertiary conclusions and legal derivations are all present on the page, allowing us to access a conversation across time and space, a conversation we are invited to join. Had the Rabbis looked for a single answer, the beauty and richness of our tradition would have been watered down to nothing, and it’s quite possible that Judaism as we understand it would not have survived. 

Holding one another’s perspectives with reverence in a time of upheaval  required the Rabbis to overcome their impulse toward avoidance. Instead, they made a spiritual practice of getting closer, of listening with curiosity about what was underneath their disagreements. Masechet Brachot page 9b finds them considering the question of when to say the morning Shema. That is to say, when is the light sufficient to be defined as morning? A few possibilities are offered in the Mishnah’s argument: Perhaps morning is defined as the moment when a person can distinguish blue from white. Or perhaps, as Rabbi Eliezer says, it’s when one can distinguish blue from green. The Gemara carries the discussion forward, with different voices introducing different possibilities: Rabbi Meir suggests it’s when you can distinguish two similar animals, like a wolf and a dog. Rabbi Akiva narrows the difference, saying when you can distinguish a donkey from a wild donkey. Still others say that morning comes when you can recognize the face of a neighbor from four cubits (or six feet) away. Ultimately the halachic ruling is with this final position. 

The Rabbis’ concern here is not just to button down when to say their prayers; we wouldn’t be so interested in this text thousands of years later, if that were the case. Rather, they’re teaching us the value of truly seeing. They’re teaching us how to pay attention, how to treat the moment, and one another, with reverence. In a similar vein, the Torah teaches in Exodus chapter 10 verse 23 that during the plague of darkness (familiar to us from the Pesach Haggadah) neighbor lost sight of neighbor, such that everyone was immobilized during the time of darkness. The physical darkness became a kind of existential metaphor: it’s not just tripping over the furniture, it’s that everyone became unhinged without the reference point of other people.

In our own time, as it grows harder and harder to see one another clearly through the distorting lenses of social media, a poisonous political discourse, and disproportionate representation in the public square from the toxic fringes; our timeless tradition offers an antidote. Indeed, it’s at the moment of the morning Shema—the moment the passage in Brachot is referring to—when we gather the fringes of our tallitot to symbolize the reunion of our entire fractious people. We declare the unity of God with all those fringes in our left hands—closer to the heart!—with threads of hope binding us together. We have no illusion that all of those fringes will all point in the same direction, but we do know: the vastness of God is able to contain their variation.

The Rabbis of the Talmud modeled for us the capacity not only to tolerate different points of view, but to learn from them. They implore us to teach our mouths to say, “I might be wrong.” And, “Tell me more.” And, “What I’m hearing from you doesn’t align with how I’ve been thinking about this, can you help me understand how you got there?” 

I want to be clear that I’m not advocating for changing our minds with every conversation, or for moral relativism. In the words of Dylan Marron of the podcast Conversations with People who Hate Me, “Empathy is not endorsement.” What I am advocating for is meeting one another with the courage to listen for the sake of understanding: for protecting our own humanity by acknowledging the other’s humanity.

Our Rabbinic literature is itself a conversation that’s been preserved because of the Sages’ open, searching minds, and their dogged determination that what we shared as a people was worth saving, despite the violence done to us and the destruction we suffered. Our ancestors invite us, in turn, to imitate their dogged determination—to see and hear one another, the better to save what can be saved. The better to save what can be saved.

The Rabbis offer a cautionary tale as to what can be lost when we stop seeking one another out, when we let insult and stereotype close off the doors of our hearts. In Masechet Baba Metzia 84a we encounter Rabbi Yochanan and his protege and havruta (study partner) Reish Lakish. When they first meet, Reish Lakish is a career criminal. Rabbi Yochanan sees his intellectual potential and convinces him to leave the bandit life and become a Torah scholar. They enjoy years of passionate yet respectful disagreement in their learning together, until in one debate about weaponry, Rabbi Yochanan blurts out a reminder of Reish Lakish’s past as a criminal. This vicious insult causes Reish Lakish so much emotional pain that he falls ill. Even then, Rabbi Yochanan refuses to apologize for his hurtful comments. It’s only after Reish Lakish dies that Rabbi Yochanan realizes the consequences of his harsh words, and laments the heartbreaking loss of his beloved partner in respectful dispute. He tries to find a new havruta, but nobody is able to challenge him the way Reish Lakish had done. Filled with remorse for having broken what was most important to him by allowing for an element of contempt to bubble up in their productive disagreements, Rabbi Yohanan himself goes mad and dies.

The ancient Rabbis saw their world shattered; they knew the perils of conflict in which respect is not a touchstone. And so, in addition to reinventing Jewish practice, in addition to preserving and elevating the work of their learning—the Sages also sounded a warning as piercing as a shofar call. Even, or especially, in times of moral degradation, seeing the divine image in one another—and acting in the image of God—are non-negotiable.

As we read in Pirkei Avot,

בְמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ
In a place where there is no humanity, strive to be human.

Let this be our watchword as we navigate our ever more fragmented world: to strive to be human, to cherish the infinite variety within the human family, and even in the deepest conflicts, to remember that they, that you, that we, are all created in the divine image. 

Shanah tovah!

Rosh Hashanah 5786 | 2025

(Delivered September 23, 2025)

Shanah tovah! 

It is so good to be together as a community; these times when we are all gathered are a dream come true for me. Let’s take a moment to feel the sweetness of it.

OK. I’m going to start with a little survey. Listen carefully. […] Blink once if you feel totally comfortable in High Holiday services and know what’s going on at every single moment. […] Blink twice if you feel like everybody around you just blinked once. […] I’m not 100% sure of the survey results because I was … blinking twice. 

This fall season wouldn’t be the same without the High Holidays. The best-known verse from the psalm for the season says:

אַחַת  שָׁאַלְתִּי מֵאֵת־יי אוֹתָהּ אֲבַקֵּשׁ
שִׁבְתִּי בְּבֵית־יי כּל־יְמֵי חַיַּי לַחֲזוֹת בְּנֹעַם־יי וּלְבַקֵּר בְּהֵיכָלוֹ
One thing I ask of Adonai, this is what I seek: to dwell in the house of God
all the days of my life, to gaze upon God’s beauty, and to visit God’s temple

And indeed as summer turns to fall, an invisible thread starts to tug at our hearts to bring us here, to our human approximation of God’s temple. Yet for all our longing to be here, for all that mysteriously pulls us in, these services can be as alienating as they are uplifting. For folks who are regular synagogue-goers, the services are different enough from the usual Shabbat service to be strange and destabilizing. And for folks whose primary engagement with prayer comes only at this time of year, the services can be long, confusing, and repetitive. If we have memories of childhood High Holiday services, they are definitionally different from this—different tunes, different people, a different rabbi. And if people don’t have those childhood associations—becase they came to this tradition with a partner or through their own journeys in life, or because they are still children—this all can feel very foreign. Objectively: catching up with old friends we haven’t seen all year by reflecting together on the fragility of life and the passage of time, and meditating on the nature of sin and the challenge of forgiveness, is kind of a weird combination.

Yet both culturally and religiously, something calls us back every year. The concept of תשובה—of return or repentance—is woven throughout the season and throughout the liturgy. 

The imagery of return is with us in the structure of the shofar service that the students just led with me. Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz, a 17th-century European sage, noted that there is a pattern of departure and return in the order of the shofar calls: tekiyah, shevarim, t’ruah, and back to tekiyah, like a baseball player taking off from home plate, and then returning to the same place having accomplished something. In Horowitz’s framework, the first tekiyah represents us when we feel whole and sure of ourselves. Shevarim, the slightly elongated broken sound, shows us the cracks just beneath the surface, the places where we are not quite aligned, or have done things we regret. Going deeper still, the t’ruah, those sobbing, shattered calls, show us the parts of us that are truly broken. Horowitz teaches that by coming to terms with the aspects of ourselves represented by the t’ruah call, we can return to the wholeness of tekiyah, stronger for having reckoned with our own brokenness. 

Another way we reflect on departure and return at this time of year is through the words, חַדֵּשׁ יָמֵינוּ כְּקֶדֶם—renew our days, like before. It’s a funny phrase. We want something new, but we want it to be similar to the past. Even when we seek new experiences, we crave the security of being able to recognize them like familiar faces and connect them to our experience. The idea that something can be both new and old is central to our holiday cycle, as we shed the old year’s hard words and cruel deeds and, as I spoke about last night, renew our hopes for the coming year.

We come home to ourselves through these rituals and words, and through the very act of entering this space as a community.

And yet for all this spiritual uplift, there are moments for many of us when, for one reason or another, we don’t quite feel like we belong here, don’t quite feel like all this belongs to us. 

Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, a Hasidic rabbi who lived in 18th-century Ukraine, was one of our wisest and most sensitive teachers. He told the following story:

One time, a certain man in a certain city dreamed that in the city of Vienna, under a bridge, there was a treasure. He went there and stood by the bridge and asked around as to how to dig there. A soldier came by and said to him, What are you doing standing here and thinking? And he thought that it would be good to tell the soldier his dream so maybe the other man could help him in exchange for a share of the treasure. So he told him.

The soldier answered saying: Oy, stupid Jew! Why do you pay attention to dreams? Couldn’t I dream a dream that there was a treasure underneath the oven in the house of a certain Jew who lives in your home town? Do you really think I’d travel there for a treasure?

The Jew was taken aback and went home to his house. He dug in the kitchen under the oven, and found the treasure. Afterward, he remarked: I had to travel to Vienna in order to know there was a treasure right near me, in my own house. 

My beloved friends, each one of us is on a journey throughout our lifetimes of going away and coming back and going away and coming back, of searching for a treasure somewhere else, and then finding that it was close by the whole time. Finding that treasure isn’t easy, and making sense of it isn’t either. I can imagine the man in our story digging underneath the oven to find the treasure and then needing to figure out how to put his kitchen back together. Teshuvah is not neat and tidy. 

My own story is full of those zigzags, from the first time I got sent to the principal’s office in religious school because, having started in 5th grade, I didn’t know what was going on and didn’t understand why I was there. The zigzags continued for decades: from refusing to schedule a Bat Mitzvah and dropping out of religious school, to putting off rabbinical school for some years because I thought it was too late for me to learn and I’d have to be alienated forever. 

But the beauty of our tradition of תשובה is that we have a whole entire framework for coming back. There will always be aspects of Jewish tradition that feel uncomfortable—I’ve got a couple myself—but תשובה invites us back and encourages us to find our way. The root letters of the word תשובה—shin vav bet—speak of return, but they are close cousins of another root word, yud shin bet meaning, to stay. Teshuvah is not only an invitation to come back, but to stay, to settle in and explore.

To be Jewish is to wrestle with God, and sometimes with ourselves. It’s there in the word ישראל—God-wrestler. Our tradition expects us: to interpret the text, to ask hard questions, to argue with God. Digging up the kitchen is bound to kick up some dust.

So for folks who are counting the pages till the end of the service, or squirming in your seats, or wondering just who is this God that keeps accounts with such coldness, what I want most to say to you is: you belong here. All this—

the long, confusing services, 
the ambiguous teachings, 
the endless details and variations,
the arguments and the counter-arguments,
the words with multiple meanings,
the melodies that float around in your head for days and weeks, 
the shofar and the honey cake, 
the grownups who pat your head and tell you how tall you’ve gotten, 
the children who make you think—sometimes too much,
the soft heart and the sharp points,
the community that loves you—

All of it. This is your treasure. 

Welcome home. Shanah tovah.

Nitzavim for TAA

(Delivered September 20, 2025)

I still remember where I was when I learned. It was a silvery spring day, the first really warm day. Sunshine, buds, short sleeves. My siblings and their spouses and Bill and I went for a nice long walk in the Nichols Arboretum, Ann Arbor, Michigan. One of my favorite places on this planet or any other.

I don’t know why, but we decided on a little game of hide-and-seek. I hadn’t played for years. There’s not much opportunity to, as a self-serious music student with ambitions as high as my vocal range. But we were getting pretty silly that day—must have been the spring air—and a game of hide-and-seek seemed like just the thing.

We decided who was “It” and scattered amongst the trees to hide while they counted. I found my spot and settled in. Then came the lesson. Having not played in a long while, and having been a very rule-obedient child, I was shocked and thrilled when I saw one of my brothers-in-law sneak out of his hiding place, run behind the “It” person and switch trees, while I crouched seemingly for an eternity behind one single oak tree.

It had never occurred to me before that minute that I wasn’t glued to my hiding place like a sitting duck. It had never occurred to me that switching hiding places was a strategy. It had never occurred to me that hidden things could change.

The whole episode came to mind this week as I was studying Parshat Nitzavim. As we’ve just heard, the parsha mainly revisits laws and teachings given in the service of the covenant that frames and permeates the book of Deuteronomy. Again, we receive the sharp warnings about what will happen, should we get caught up in idolatry, and again, we receive the gentle promises that returning to the fold is always possible, that if only we restore ourselves and our children to the right path, God will take us back in love.

And in the midst of this push and pull of sin and repentance, comes the mysterious pasuk that finds the hidden and the visible in a subtle dance. Deuteronomy chapter 29, verse 28 reads: 

הַנִּסְתָּרֹת לַיי אֱלֹהֵינוּ וְהַנִּגְלֹת לָנוּ וּלְבָנֵינוּ עַד־עוֹלָם לַעֲשׂוֹת אֶת־כָּל־דִּבְרֵי הַתּוֹרָה הַזֹּאת
What is hidden is for Adonai our God, and what is revealed is for us and our children eternally,
to do all of this instruction

The commentators make the logical connection that the word נִּסְתָּרֹת—that which is hidden—refers to secret idolatry. The bigger lesson, though, is that there are things that are known only to God. 

One of my earliest teachers taught me this—although neither he nor I knew he was my teacher as it happened. In a moment of teenage discombobulation, I went to stay for a few days with our longtime family friends, Jerry and Roberta Goldman, to recover from a broken heart. One afternoon, sitting in the backyard, I poured out my uncertainties and sadness, and Jerry, a rabbi who is as sensitive as he is brilliant, gently said, “Life is like a tapestry we can only see the back of. We see the knots and the clusters of threads tangled together and, sometimes if we’re lucky, the barest hints of what the picture on the other side might be. Only God sees the whole thing, and somehow, from God’s side, it makes sense.”

When it was first offered, Jerry’s lesson was one of hope and perspective, a grownup’s thoughtful advice to an overwrought teenager. Only later have I begun to see it also as a teaching about humility. Each and every one of us, no matter how curious and knowledgeable we might be, is limited in what we can observe. Countless factors contribute to this, from temperament to environment to the thousand quirks of the moment. The plain truth is that we can only ever see a small part of the world around us, and everything we perceive is a product of our experiences, expectations, and biases. It’s easiest and most normal for us to see what we’ve always seen, what we plan to see.

This is all the more so in the current polarized media environment, as we’ve witnessed to a horrifying degree in recent weeks. The shocking murder of Conservative media personality Charlie Kirk is only the latest Rorschach Test that maps political and social orientations onto the very perception of reality. While folks to my left have been excoriating Kirk as one of the most vile people ever to walk the earth, folks to my right have been canonizing him. The government’s policies on immigration, free speech, and gender issues are similarly met with cheering in some quarters and loathing in others. Many believe we are edging toward fascism; many believe we’re finally cleaning things up. Families and communities are navigating real schisms based on the American political scene, based on the situation in Israel and Gaza, based on world views about gender, sexuality, and race, based on beliefs about the rights and freedoms and responsibilities we regard as sacrosanct. The point is that in a feverish environment like the current moment, in which we don’t talk to one another across difference, the things we might be able to agree about remain hidden. And what’s revealed is so skewed as to be cartoonish. 

Between the technology that dominates so much of our waking lives, and the algorithm that offers us refills on what we already have decided is truth, and simple social isolation, we, as a society, have lost the thread of what constitutes fact, much less nuance. Each of us comes to conclusions that make sense, based on the information we’ve been fed. But we are not ordering from the full menu, and we are not asking questions of one another across the table.

I often lament how disheartening it is to hear people say they just can’t talk to so-and-so because their politics are not aligned. The less we hear ideas and viewpoints that challenge us, the more convinced we become not only of our rightness but of the essential wrongness of anyone who thinks differently. The middle space where we talk things over and consider multiple angles hollows out, while the habit of dehumanization gets ever more ingrained in us. There’s an arrogance to the whole vicious cycle, a knee-jerk dismissal of anything from the so-called other side. And what I want to say to you is that yes, there may be things about the ideology on the other side that are disagreeable or even hateful, but much of what we’re tagging as hateful is being fed to us in a way designed to make us think that. The same is true for the person you most vividly differ with. 

For the most part, the places where we get information are curating content and viewpoints for maximum agitation, at once disparaging those who see things differently and flattering our assumptions. All this is a very effective way of keeping us scrolling so they can generate more ad revenue. Our very humanity is being bought and sold, while our capacity for holding multiple perspectives with curiosity erodes with every conversation we avoid.

But the hidden things, the nuances of who we are, away from political argument, are known to God alone. What’s revealed is very much at the human level, and we simply can’t see the whole thing. Yet that long-ago game of hide-and-seek holds a lesson too. Hidden things can change, and we always have the choice to look harder at what’s revealed and wonder, together and apart, What is it that God sees in all this? What else is it that God sees in all this? And how can I teach my children to return to a stable path, so God can take us back in love?

We can never know the fullness of this world, but we can respect the not knowing, hold our convictions with humility and others’ with curiosity, and, in the words of Leonard Cohen, bless the covenant of love between what is hidden and what is revealed.

Shabbat Shalom!